Day One Part II - FOSDEM 2024

I made it a point to pick swags and donate to the booths that I visited and that way, I could not only have something to treasure the memories with but also have a way to appreciate all the good work they have been up to. Just like that, we were through with the neighbouring booths of Matrix Project, Mozilla Foundation and Mastodon Project located nearby and we were planning on heading off the level two of building K. Michal Konecny's wizardry hat was getting recognized as we started using it as a collage for all the lapel pins from all the booths we have visited so far. At the Open Source Design booth, I came across Saptak Sengupta, who was attending the booth at the time.

Just like Kushal Das, he did not require my introduction as he knew about me - even though we were meeting in person for the first time. We managed to get ourselves a bunch of fun stickers from the next few booths in the arrangement that we picked extra copies of for our friends and colleagues. Michal Konecny and I met up with Tomas Hrcka at the FOSSAsia booth who was there to purchase LED-powered nametags. After getting through the booths belonging to the Open Culture Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, and Linux Foundation Europe - we met up with our friends from the CERN Open Source who shared their successful pilot FOSDEM booth experience with us.

As we advanced to the OpenSUSE booth located near the Linux Foundation Europe booth, we met up with one of the booth attendants who also happened to be an OpenSUSE Board member. I donated to the OpenSUSE foundation in exchange for a tee shirt for myself, a gecko plushie as a gift for my family members and a beer for Michal Konecny. At the very end of the level, we headed to the OpenSSL project booth where talked with the booth attendants and were provided with cool tee shirts as souvenirs. With the level two exploration wrapped up, we backtracked our way to level one to visit some more booths after mistakenly heading to level three where devrooms were organized.

The two of us were ecstatic to see the Minetest booth and we discussed with the booth attendants about a Minetest Dedicated Server deployment we have in the Fedora Project community called "Mine With Fedora". Passing through the booths belonging to the Badge.Team project, WolfSSL and openHAB, we came across a group of booths focussed on infrastructure services like those of Proxmox VE, Ansible, Grafana and others. At the Ansible booth, I was welcomed by Anwesha Das who greeted me like an old friend, even when I was meeting her in person for the first time. Having interactions like these when I am thousands of miles away from home fills my heart with warmth and compassion.

At the Grafana booth, the attendants showed their pleasure from hearing about us using their project in Fedora Infrastructure by giving some exclusive stickers. In the booth section dedicated to communities working on embedded devices, we came across the PINE64 and FreeCAD booths where their merchandise was on sale to early adopters. At the opposite end of this section, we visited booths like those of MariaDB, Percona LLC and PostgreSQL. From the PostgreSQL booth, I donated in exchange for a fancy hoodie with the PostgreSQL branding embroidered on the chest area before moving on to the section designated for Office Suite and Productivity-related communities.

After visiting the booths belonging to CiviCRM, Joplin, NextCloud and Thunderbird communities, I donated to LibreOffice in exchange for a tee shirt and some cool stickers. In the section designated for Development Environments as well, I donated to Jenkins in exchange for a tee shirt after visiting booths related to the Codeberg, GNU Radio and Homebrew. After wrapping up with the booths at level one at around 0330 pm Central European Standard Time, Michal Konecny and I decided to head back to the building AW after catching up briefly with Mariana Balla. I informed her about Sumantro Mukherjee's possible return to the event venue at around 0500 pm Central European Standard Time.

On our way back to the building AW, we met up with Sandro sitting near the gate with whom I stayed back after getting my lunch from Justin W. Flory. For the next hour, we discussed the reasons why Fedora Badges were not getting reprioritized by the Fedora Infrastructure team and losing community attention in terms of maintenance. At around 0500 pm Central European Standard Time, the folks from the Fedora Project and CentOS Project communities gathered together for a group photograph. The folks from the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team also gathered for a separate photograph, before packing up the booth for the day and starting on our way back to the hotel.

We had roughly three hours to spend before heading back again for the Fedora Project and CentOS Project Community Contributor dinner. Michal Konecny and I decided to stay back at the Rogier station to explore a 3D Dinosaur Theme Park where he wanted to take his partner and to find an ATM as I had run out of cash. After a brief respite and noting the eleventh-moment change in the location, Fabian Arrotin, Aurelien Bompard, Michal Konecny, Tomas Hrcka and I arrived early at the restaurant. With folks from Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and AlmaLinux Foundation also joining us for the meal, it took no time for the restaurant to become lively with the guest's arrival.

I was already out of my social battery by the time the dinner began but thankfully, I had an interesting crowd around me that kept me from literally falling asleep on the dinner table. With Justin W. Flory raising a toast and delivering a heartfelt note to everyone assembled there, I dug into my starters consisting of Smoked Salmon and French Fries. The favourite part of the meal was ironically the orange-flavoured Fanta beverage and the Chocolate Mousse that was served as a part of the dessert. With that, we wrapped up the first day of the FOSDEM 2024 and the five of us boarded a tram back to the hotel at around 1130 pm Central European Standard Time and decided to call it a day.